The Charge

Four chronicles of men and women on long and serpentine roads to
redemption.

The Case

I have to confess, I knew very little about Italian director Raffaello
Matarazzo before checking out Criterion's Raffaello Matarazzo's Runaway
Melodramas box set (being released as part of their Eclipse series). Today,
Matarazzo is much less well-known than peers like Vittorio De Sica and Roberto
Rossellini, but Matarazzo was at one point the most commercially successful
director in Italian cinema. Best-known for his lurid melodramas, Matarazzo made
wildly over-the-top films that were as despised by critics as they were loved by
audiences (making him the Tyler Perry of his day, I suppose). Positioning him as
a splendid entertainer whose films are worthy of comparison with those of
Douglas Sirk and Lucio Visconti, Criterion has offered up four of Matarazzo's
most popular films for rediscovery.

Matarazzo had actually been working in cinema for quite some time before he
first turned to melodrama with Chains, the film that would launch his
identity as a filmmaker who embraced joyfully absurd storytelling. Our story
concerns a woman named Rosa (Yvonne Sanson), who has two young children and is
happily married to a mechanic (Amedeo Nazzari). One day, a man (Aldo Nicodemi)
from Rosa's past appears and attempts to persuade Rosa to abandon her family and
come back to him. Rosa refuses, but circumstances soon spin beyond her control
and force her to make some very difficult decisions. While the performances are
naturalistic and the technical side of Matarazzo's filmmaking is actually pretty
low-key, the storytelling piles on one wild twist after another. It isn't great
cinema (it lacks the wonderfully florid touches that so remarkably enhance the
stories of Sirk and Visconti), but it's a well-executed, rather enjoyable
reminder of why soap operas can be so appealing.

There are a couple of entertaining thing about watching the films in
chronological order: first, Matarazzo employs many of the same cast and crew
members from film to film, and we get to watch the way they progress along with
the director. Secondly, Matarazzo seems intent on topping himself in terms of
pure craziness each time, meaning we get increasingly loopy contrivances from
film to film. While some might find this grating, fans of melodrama in general
will undoubtedly appreciate the escalating insanity. Chains almost seems
restrained in contrast to Tormento, which follows a young woman named
Anna (Yvonne Sanson) as she runs away from home to join her lover Carlo (Amedeo
Nazzari). Alas, Carlo is accused of murder, Anna gets pregnant and is forced to
return to her evil stepmother (Tina Lattanzi) for support. Tormento is a
bit sillier than Chains, but faster-paced, relentlessly involving and
amplifying the intriguing religious symbolism which played a small role in
Chains.

The feverish plot developments come at breakneck speed in Nobody's
Children, another tale about a young couple split apart and forced to deal
with both an unplanned pregnancy and the plotting of a genuinely evil parental
figure. Sanson and Nazzari are once again playing the key roles, and by this
point their ability to sell even the most preposterous of plot developments has
developed into something rather impressive. Matarazzo proves even more shameless
in his emotional manipulation this time around, even going so far as to include
a scene in which we're forced to watch a helpless German Shepherd choke to death
in a burning building while a baby is being kidnapped by a villain. The
religious element is dialed up yet again too, as Sanson gets herself to a
nunnery and begins a new life of Christian devotion. Unlike Tormento and
Chains, Nobody's Children doesn't conclude on a note of triumphant
redemption, but that's probably because it's only the first half of an epic
two-part saga.

The second half arrives in the form of The White Angel, arguably the
finest film of this collection and the most overheated (an out-of-context line:
"Go ahead and shoot -- but you'll kill the baby first!"). It's
difficult to talk about the events of the film without spoiling some key
developments in Nobody's Children, but suffice it so that the Sanson and
Nazzari characters are placed through another gauntlet of impossibly wrenching
challenges. Early shades of Vertigo are present in a subplot involving a
doppelganger, and the film easily matches its predecessor in terms of delivering
an overwhelming torrent of frantic plot twists before reaching the finish line.
As you might expect, this installment does indeed provide audiences the closure
Nobody's Children so harshly denied, and stands as a demonstration of
just how powerful Matarazzo's filmmaking could be. These are movies that must be
taken on their own terms (basically, if you dislike melodrama as a whole, none
of the virtues these films have will win you over), but they're quite enjoyable
affairs that show off an underappreciated populist side of Italian cinema.

While less work is put into the transfers on these Eclipse releases than the
more high-profile Criterion Collection titles, the films included in this set
look pretty good. Only Chains is a little rough, suffering from some very
soft shots and a whole bunch of scratches and flecks. The films get steadily
better-looking from there, and The White Angel is actually very
impressive. Audio is a bit rougher, as the first three films all contain a good
bit of hiss, crackling and muffled music. Things are stronger on The White
Angel, but still far from perfect. As usual, there are no extras included on
any of the discs (though the slim DVD cases include a few paragraphs on each
film).

I'm not quite persuaded that Mr. Matarazzo is a cinematic genius, but he's
certainly a distinctive filmmaker worthy of our attention. "Fun" isn't
often an adjective that applies to Eclipse releases (though many of them are
excellent), but that's precisely what this unhinged four-film set is.
Raffaello Matarazzo's Runaway Melodramas is a collection that's sure to
deliver plenty of entertainment.